Martin Blumenthal-Barby works at the intersection of film and media theory, philosophy, and aesthetics, analyzing visual culture as a site where political, ethical, and epistemic questions take form. His research centers on problems of judgment, agency, and spectatorship across modern and contemporary media, with particular attention to European film and continental thought.

He studied film, literature, philosophy and theater studies at the Freie Universität Berlin, Cornell University, and Yale University. At Rice University, he serves on the Steering Committee of the Program in Media Studies and teaches courses in film analysis, biopolitics, cinema history, and the relationship between visual culture and political modernity. He was a Fellow at Stanford University’s Humanities Center.

Blumenthal-Barby is the author of Cinema and Surveillance: The Asymmetric Gaze (Routledge, 2024; substantially revised English version of Der asymmetrische Blick: Film und Überwachung, Wilhelm Fink, 2016), Arendt, Kant, and the Enigma of Judgment (Northwestern University Press, 2022), and Inconceivable Effects: Ethics through Twentieth-Century German Literature, Thought, and Film (Cornell University Press, 2013). He is also the editor of The Place of Politics in German Film (Aisthesis, 2014) and has published widely in leading journals in film studies, philosophy, and literary theory. His current research examines competing conceptions of agency at the intersection of visual media and artificial intelligence.

Selected Publications

1. Books and Edited Volumes

• Cinema and Surveillance: The Asymmetric Gaze (New York, NY: Routledge, 2024).
• Arendt, Kant, and the Enigma of Judgment (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2022).
• Der asymmetrische Blick: Film und Überwachung (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2016).
• Ed., The Place of Politics in German Film (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2014).
• Inconceivable Effects: Ethics through Twentieth-Century German Literature, Thought, and Film (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013).

2. Journal Articles and Book Chapters

• “Violence, Cosmology, and the Yield of Human Agency in Herzog,” symploke 34/1-2 (forthcoming 2026).
• “Example, Exemplarity, Elizabeth Eckford,” in Nicholas Dunn (ed.), Hannah Arendt’s “Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy” (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2024).
• “The Exemplarity of Particulars: Arendt on Validity,” Arcadia: International Journal of Literary Culture 56/2 (2021), 243-51.
• “‘Judgment without Standards’: Arendt’s Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy,” Philosophical Forum 52/2 (2021), 165–75.
• “Prolegomena per una narratologia politico-teologica,” Filosofia Politica 33/2 (2019), 343-50.
• “The Complicit Gaze: Michael Haneke’s Cinema of Guilt,” The German Quarterly 89/2 (Spring 2016), 202-20.
• “Counter-Music: Harun Farocki’s Theory of a New Image Type,” October 151 (2015), 128-50.
• “‘Cinematography of Devices’: Harun Farocki’s Eye/Machine Trilogy,” German Studies Review 38/2 (Spring 2015), 329-51.
• “The Surveillant Gaze: Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon,” October 147 (2014), 95-116.
• “Faces of Evil: Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler,” Seminar 49/3 (2013), 322-43.
• “Of Friends and Foes: Lang’s Cinema of War,” Krieg und Literatur/War and Literature 18 (2012), 95-118.
• “Holocaust and Herring: The Resuscitation of the Silenced in W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn,” Monatshefte 103 (2011), 537-58.
• “Pernicious Bastardizations: Benjamin’s Ethics of Pure Violence,” Modern Language Notes 124 (2009), 728-51.
• “‘The Odium of Doubtfulness,’ or the Vicissitudes of Arendt’s Metaphorical Thinking,” New German Critique 36/1 (Winter 2009), 61-81.
• “Germany in Autumn: The Return of the Human,” Discourse 29/1 (2008), 140-68.
• “Why Does Hannah Arendt Lie?, or the Vicissitudes of Imagination,” The Germanic Review 82/4 (2008), 369-88.